[ppml] Proposed Policy: IPv4 Countdown

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

>-----Original Message-----
>From: ppml-bounces at arin.net [mailto:ppml-bounces at arin.net]On Behalf Of
>Kevin Kargel
>Sent: Friday, March 16, 2007 10:59 AM
>To: ppml at arin.net
>Subject: Re: [ppml] Proposed Policy: IPv4 Countdown
>
>
>First I feel I need to jump in and say we are all underestimating the
>resourcefulness of the internet user.  OK, I admit I'm an old fart and
>that when I started in the internet you had to solder your own modem and
>beg or bribe a professor or a scientist for dial-up access at 128 baud.
>At that time there was no IANA, no ARIN, not even any concept like DNS
>but people figured out how to communicate, even if they had to type the
>routing tables in by hand every time they turned the computer on.
>
>The internet is hard and fastly integrated in to most peoples way of
>life.  Society needs it.  The internet is not going away, no matter
>what.  People WILL find a way to have internet.
>
>I agree there will undoubtedly be "a jillion v4 nats"..  but people will
>learn to deal with it.
>Routing tables will be huge..  people will find a way to pay for the
>hardware to handle it..
>
>Re-sale of IPV4 space will happen, unless ARIN see's fit to break things
>down to /28 or smaller allocations.. I don't see that happening.  The
>centralized admin overhead would be enormous.  Regardless, when IPV4
>routing becomes a valuable commodity people will find a way to profit by
>it.
>
>IPV6 only networks will be able to connect to the internet.  Some
>enterprising company will figure out a way to offer a commercial
>IPv6-IPv4 gateway to non-IPv4 networks and make a profit from it.
>
>As with all times of crisis someone will figure out how to solve the
>problem and make a profit from it.
>

You are correct that if NO planning is done that people will use their
resources to find a way around the problem.

When gasoline prices went up a lot of people in US cities started riding
mopeds and scooters to work.

The question though is that do we really want to live with the kind of
ad-hoc bandaids that will be created by people's own resourcefulness,
or do we want to take easy steps now so that we can avoid a lot of these
bandaids later?

In the US we still do not know now if the increase in scooter riding has
greatly increased the number of fatal accidents and so on.  It may very
well be that when you look at increased motorcycle and scooter riding,
particularly by casual riders who are only doing it to save money on
gasoline,
that the costs to society for dealing with the afteraffects of increased
fatalities exceed the individual fuel savings.  Particularly as it has been
shown that when the cost of gas drops people simply drive more miles,
thus the savings they get are cancelled out by the increased number of
gallons they buy.

If we have a plan going forward we can do some work in advance to avoid
problems.  If we do nothing going forward we do not know what will result,
and thus it is simply impossible to know if a particular decision (such as
selling NAT technologies) will have bad side effects later on or not.

I invite you to look at the mess in Southern California to see what the
effects of not doing land use planning in advance will produce.  The
majority of people living there today wish that land use planning had
gone into effect 60 years ago.  But today it's too late since everything
is all built up, and introducing land planning today will create far more
problems than it would solve, and you would not see any benefits for
a century.

Ted